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Is a sluggish metabolism keeping you from losing weight or increasing your risk of illness? There are several quick and easy lifestyle changes you can make to boost your metabolism, make your body run more efficiently and reach your weight-loss goals.

Eat enough!

Did you know that dieting actually lowers your metabolism? Cutting your caloric intake is the foundation of weight loss, but eating too little will not help maintain your ideal weight in the long run. Your body requires calories to perform all of its necessary functions, so when this energy is not available, the body actually slows down its metabolic rate in order to conserve energy and keep everything running.

Takeaway message here? Do not follow fad diets that are low in calories and depend on a select few foods. You will suffer less, plus you will protect your body from breaking down muscles and reducing its water content.

Start with making varied food choices, choosing all food groups and eating regular small meals and snacks. These include:

Colourful fruits and vegetables, especially dark green leafy vegetables, are rich in chlorophyll, which helps to rebuild and replenish your red blood cells, boosting your energy.

Dairy such as fresh milk and yoghurt help you maintain your blood sugar, while labaneh (strained yoghurt) and cheese offer a good source of bacteria for a healthier bowel movement.

Fish, meats and chicken marinated with yoghurt and seasoning or with added kiwi and pineapple (to enhance its digestibility).

Protein-rich foods

Protein has a huge impact on your body-fat percentage. Since increasing muscle mass can boost metabolism, eating more protein helps speed up your metabolism. Here is how this works: foods rich in protein consume a

lot of energy from the body and control appetite. Protein is made up of amino acids that help build, repair and maintain muscle tissue, but without enough protein, the body falls into a catabolic state where it fuels itself by breaking down muscle, rather than fat, for energy. Researchers found that obese adults who ate three servings of fat-free yoghurt a day as part of a reduced- calorie diet lost 22 per cent more weight and 61 per cent more body fat than those who simply cut calories and did not bone up on calcium. Yoghurt eaters also lost 81per cent more fat in the stomach area than non-yoghurt eaters.

Remember that protein is not always from meat sources. Asparagus, mushroom and legumes are all rich in protein. So try to mix them in your dinners to help you control elevated blood sugar levels during the night.

Drinks that 

contain antioxidants

White tea and herbal teas raise your body metabolism better than coffee due to their high antioxidant content. Coffee lovers need not worry — you still can have semi- roasted or green coffee beans, as they also increase your body’s metabolism, especially when you mix them with herbs such as turmeric, cloves, cardamom and cinnamon. Studies also show that mixing instant coffee with coconut milk helps control your appetite for longer.

Deep red fruits

Berries, strawberries and prunes are rich in antioxidants and low in calories. They boost metabolism and enhance your immune system, making your body more stable and balanced.

Drinking water ice cold

Body temperature affects your metabolism! If it is very cold or very hot, the rate of metabolism goes up by about 10 per cent. You can manipulate your body temperature

by some food choices like chilli or cinnamon — they can increase your blood circulation, raise your body temperature and even reduce your blood sugar. Cold water can reduce the diametre of your blood vessels and enhance blood circulation as it forces the body to expend more energy (and calories) in order to warm it up to body temperature.

Negative calorie foods

Although no food is actually “calorie free”, there are certain foods that have such few calories that the act of digestion in the body will burn more calories than the food itself, creating a negative calorie balance. For example, a 25 calorie piece of broccoli (100 grams) requires 80 calories to digest, which results in a net loss of 55 calories! Some great foods that are extremely low in calories and require a lot of energy for the body to break them down include asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, lettuce and zucchini and fruits like berries.

Ginger

You can burn fat by consuming ginger because it speeds up the metabolism. I recommend that you avoid having ginger on an empty stomach and encourage you to use it after a high-protein breakfast or lunch.

Fibre

Complex carbohydrates and fibre raise your metabolism by keeping insulin levels low after you eat. Increase in the production of insulin hormone, which is a result of a diet rich in simple sugars or high salt intake, sends a signal to the body that “it’s time to start storing fat”. In order to store fat, your body has to slow down the metabolism, causing you to burn fewer calories. For example, oatmeal breaks down slowly in the stomach; it causes less of a sharp increase in insulin levels than pastries or white bread rich in yeast. Plus, these kinds of foods accumulate carbon dioxide in the body and reduce oxygenation to cells. Therefore, white bread rich in yeast and pastries reduce your metabolism.

Body temperature affects your metabolism! If it is very cold or very hot, the rate of metabolism goes up by about 10 per cent. You can manipulate your body temperature

by some food choices like chilli or cinnamon — they can increase your blood circulation, raise your body temperature and even reduce your blood sugar. Cold water can reduce the diametre of your blood vessels and enhance blood circulation as it forces the body to expend more energy (and calories) in order to warm it up to body temperature.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

FRANKFURT — Anyone tempted to #DeleteFacebook after the personal data of millions of users fell into the hands of a political consultancy is still likely to be monitored by the social network, which tracks nearly 30 per cent of global website traffic. 

And Google, in various guises, shadows 64 per cent of all web-browsing worldwide, a recent study (https://www.ghostery.com/lp/study) of 200,000 German users by Cliqz (https://cliqz.com/en), using its anti-tracking product Ghostery (https://www.ghostery.com), said.

Neither Facebook nor Google responded to e-mails asking whether they viewed the Cliqz research as representative.

A larger study (https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/webcensus) of web trackers by researchers at Princeton University in 2016 produced similar results, with Google Analytics and other Google trackers taking the top five places, followed by Facebook.

Cliqz, majority owned by German publisher Hubert Burda Media and backed by Mozilla, creator of the Firefox browser, is one of several startups that promises to protect personal data.

“We prevent companies like this from spying on you,” Chief Executive Marc Al Hames told Reuters.

From private browsers like Cliqz to anti-trackers and ad blockers, such firms seek to shield users from intrusion. Mainstream providers in Europe are also trying to differentiate themselves by stressing privacy.

“Every time there is a scandal like this at the US companies it boosts our business,” Ralph Dommermuth, founder and CEO of Germany’s United Internet, told Reuters. The company offers encrypted email services, hosted in Germany under its strict privacy laws, and does not sell users’ data.

United Internet and others recently formed a “Login Alliance” offering a single, secure way for their 50 million users to give consent in compliance with new European Union privacy rules that enter into force in May.

That contrasts with rampant use in the past of Facebook Login by companies to tap personal data.

Volcanic eruption

Privacy advocates have warned for years that Facebook’s terms of use left it open to data harvesting.

Psychologist Aleksandr Kogan collected data on 50 million Facebook by creating a personality quiz taken by a few hundred thousand people. In consenting to its terms, they let the app collect information on their Facebook “friends” — without their knowledge or consent.

The US academic passed that data to Cambridge Analytica, which applied data science and psychographic profiling to back Donald Trump’s election campaign — violating Facebook’s rules.

“It’s the volcano that was going to erupt at some point — we just didn’t know when,” Ben Williams, director of communications and operations at Germany-based Adblock Plus (https://adblockplus.org), said.

AdBlock Plus has 100 million users seeking protection from ads such as auto-play videos. It is not a privacy product as such, although users can tweak settings to increase protection.

Most people do not mind normal search advertising, but object to intrusive third-party ads, Williams said.

Loss of Facebook

The Facebook leak shows that the data should never have been collected, Cliqz’s Al Hames said: “We should all be outraged but nobody should be surprised. Everybody who has data will eventually lose that data.”

Cliqz has an icon that shows how many private data points trackers are trying to access when you visit a site.

Its anti-tracking feature substitutes private data with random information to throw them off your trail, while there is also an anti-phishing feature to thwart data theft.

Cliqz does store browsing history at the “edge” — on desktops and smartphones — and uses this to personalise search.

Without giving direct access, it also lets firms use that information to target adverts using its MyOffrz https://myoffrz.com/en product in a way that complies with the new EU privacy rules.

“We can deliver a targeted ad — but it doesn’t mean that there is information about you on our servers,” Al Hames said.

Cliqz has around half a million active users, while Ghostery, the browser extension that monitors which web servers are being called from a given page, has around 7 million users.

Smokers who also use e-cigarettes may be half as likely to give up tobacco as smokers who never vape at all, a European study suggests.

Even when smokers only occasionally experimented with vaping, they were about 67 per cent less likely to become ex-smokers, the study found. Daily e-cigarette use was associated with 48 per cent lower odds of having quit regular cigarettes.

“This is important because e-cigarettes are widely promoted as a smoking cessation tool,” said senior author Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco.

“And, while there is no question that some smokers do successfully quit with e-cigarettes, they keep many more people smoking,” Glantz said by e-mail.

Smokers in the study also used more cigarettes a day when they vaped than when they avoided e-cigarettes altogether, researchers report in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

People smoked an average of about 14 cigarettes a day when they did not vape, and around 16 cigarettes a day when they did.

Researchers analysed data from a 2014 survey of more than 13,000 current or former smokers in the European Union. About 2,500 participants said they had tried vaping at least once.

Overall, they were 50 years old on average, 46 percent of the participants were former smokers and 19 per cent currently or previously used e-cigarettes.

Among these people who had all been cigarette smokers at some point, the researchers looked at the likelihood of being an ex-smoker at the time of the survey based on whether a person used e-cigarettes.

Some past research has suggested that using e-cigarettes may help smokers cut down on use of traditional tobacco products, or even transition entirely away from tobacco.

“The findings are concerning because they suggest the idea that e-cigarettes are an even more effective cessation tool than nicotine replacement therapy — an idea aggressively marketed by e-cigarette and tobacco companies — may not be true in practice,” said Samir Soneji, a health policy researcher at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who was not involved in the study.

Most adult smokers express a desire to quit, and many try and fail, Soneji said by e-mail. E-cigarettes might seem like an appealing cessation tool because the devices in some ways mimic the smoking, but nicotine gum or patches may be more effective.

“Most of the scientific evidence to date, including this study, finds that e-cigarette use does not lead to higher rates of smoking cessation compared to standard cessation tools,” Soneji said by e-mail.

Big US tobacco companies are all developing e-cigarettes. The battery-powered gadgets feature a glowing tip and a heating element that turns liquid nicotine and flavourings into a cloud of vapor that users inhale.

The study was not a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how e-cigarette use might influence the success of any smoking cessation efforts. The survey also did not ask current smokers whether they were trying to quit or cut down on tobacco use, or if they were using e-cigarettes for that purpose.

Another drawback is that researchers lacked data on when ex-smokers had quit and it is possible some of them stopped before e-cigarettes were widely available.

A bigger question about e-cigarettes — whether they are safe or at least safer than traditional cigarettes — also is not answered by the current study.

When e-cigarettes contain nicotine, they can be addictive like traditional cigarettes. Even without nicotine, some previous research suggests that flavourings and other ingredients in e-liquids used for vaping could be linked to serious breathing problems.

“Whether they are safer than cigarettes is almost a trick question because tobacco cigarettes are one of the most harmful substances known to medicine,” said Thomas Wills, director of the Cancer Prevention in the Pacific Programme at the University of Hawaii Cancer Centre in Honolulu.

“It would be hard to find anything more harmful to long-term health except maybe arsenic,” Wills, who was not involved in the study, said by e-mail. “But this does not mean that e-cigarettes are safe.”

Mass-produced shoe inserts available on drugstore shelves and customised orthotics may not work for plantar heel pain, a research review suggests.

Plantar heel pain is one of the most common foot ailments, accounting for about 15 per cent of foot symptoms requiring medical attention and 10 per cent of running injuries, researchers note in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Many doctors recommend shoe inserts to ease this pain by supporting the arches and taking pressure off the heel, but research to date has been inconclusive about the effectiveness of this approach.

For the current study, researchers examined data from 20 previously conducted experiments that randomly assigned some participants to wear shoe inserts and other participants to join a control group receiving no treatment, a sham insert or a different intervention.

Altogether they tested eight different custom or mass-produced shoe inserts.

Short-term pain relief was similar with and without shoe inserts, and there was not any difference between prefabricated models and custom versions, the study found.

“A patient might still prefer to try an orthotic and based on this study, could try a cheaper orthotic first as opposed to a more expensive one, which is custom made,” said lead author Nadine Rasenberg of Erasmus Medical Centre Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

While shoe inserts might be better than nothing, the current study was not designed to answer this question, Rasenberg said by email.

“Most patients prefer to try an intervention as opposed to a `wait and see’ approach,” Rasenberg added. “It remains unknown, whether orthotics are better than doing nothing.”

Orthotics did appear slightly better than sham inserts in the current study, but the difference was too small to rule out the possibility that it was due to chance.

This suggests that orthotics might work for some people, but not others, said Glen Whittaker, a podiatry researcher at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, who wasn’t involved in the study. More research is still needed to determine who might benefit, and under what circumstances, Whittaker said by e-mail.

“Appropriately contoured foot orthoses may reduce plantar heel pain by redistributing pressure away from the bottom of the heel to the arch, and may also prevent the arch from dropping, which may reduce tension in the plantar fascia,” Whittaker said.

One limitation of the current study is that it examined results from many small experiments with different methods for testing the effectiveness of orthotics. The small studies also differed in duration and how they assessed pain relief.

Even though they are widely used, orthotics are not the only option for plantar heel pain, said Dr Selene Parekh, a researcher at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and partner in the North Carolina Orthopedic Clinic.

Patients can also try night splints or stretching exercises done at home or as part of a supervised physical therapy programme, Parekh, who was not involved in the study, said by email. Modified exercise and activity habits may also help avoid irritating the tissues around the heel that cause pain.

If they choose orthotics, patients should look for the cheapest option.

“It seems that patients can attempt to provide some relief to their plantar heel pain using cheaper, readily available orthotics found in grocery stores, online, and stores in their community,” Parekh added. “Based on this study, it appears that the cost of a custom orthotic, which can reach hundreds of dollars, is not medically necessary.”

HELSINKI — Finns have long been perceived as taciturn and introverted people in a country known for its dark, cold winters and high suicide rate. Today, they are also considered the world’s happiest.

In the just released 2018 UN World Happiness Report, Finland took the top spot followed by its Scandinavian neighbours and Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

“When we heard about it, we thought it was a mistake,” laughed Ulla-Maija Rouhiainen, a 64-year-old retiree living in Helsinki.

The UN report found that Finland and the other countries at the top of the rankings all performed well on key issues that support well-being: income, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom, trust and generosity.

Finns’ happiness, as often seen in acclaimed Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki’s emotionless films, is based on the fact that their basic needs are being met.

For philosopher Frank Martela, life satisfaction depends on how well a country’s institutions function, social equality, freedom, lack of corruption, trust in government and in each other.

Finland excels in each of these areas. Wage gaps are narrow, and the annual median salary in 2015 was 25,694 euros ($31,575). That compares to 21,970 euros in France and to 7,352 euros in Latvia the same year.

Along with Norway, Finland is the only European country to have succeeded in cutting the number of homeless people between 2014 and 2016, according to a study by the European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless  published earlier this week.

Quality of life

Overall, Finns daily lives are generally harmonious.

They have an efficient healthcare system, flexible working hours and generous parental leave, making it possible to balance work and family life.

Neither the heavy tax burden, which pays for efficient public services, nor the centre-right government’s austerity measures, aimed at boosting economic recovery after years of slump, are questioned.

And they trust their welfare state: 81 per cent of Finns have confidence in the education system compared to an OECD average of 67 per cent. And 75 per cent trust the judicial system compared to the international organisation’s average of 55 per cent.

After spending 18 years abroad, Finland’s social welfare model drew Henrika Tonder, her French husband and their children back to the country.

“You can achieve a life balance between work and personal life where people finish work between 4 and 5 pm, which still leaves us time to do things for ourselves and to spend time with our families,” she told AFP.

In a nation where few people go to church, saunas, one of the most popular leisure activities, have replaced mass.

The 5.5 million Finns indulge in the steamy relaxation at least once a week.

“When you’re in a sauna, you feel really happy,” says 68-year-old Teri Kauranen, warming herself after a chilly dip in the sea.

“When it’s snowing I guess it might be hard to think that Finnish people might be the happiest in the world,” Frank Martela says with a grin.

Yet tough times require resilience, and Finns are known for their stoic attitude towards life, attributed to their cultural concept “sisu”: the ability to stand strong against adversity and recover from disaster.

If the UN definition of happiness ignored the main indicators and was based on measuring positive emotions, then Finland “would not reach the top ten”, according to Frank Martela.

The nation’s suicide rate (14.1 per 100,000 in 2014), consumption of alcohol and anti-depressants remains high.

PARIS — Do you prefer organic food? Did you study in Mexico? Do you like red shoes? Such bits of information about Facebook users may seem insignificant in isolation but, once harvested on a grand scale, make the internet giant billions. Here’s how:

‘If you are not paying, you are product’ 

Newbies signing up for Facebook are greeted with the promise that the social network is “free and always will be”. 

But if users do not pay, then how does Facebook generate its massive profits, nearly $16 billion last year, up 56 percent from 2016? The answer is: via advertising, which at the last count made up a whopping 98.5 per cent of the company’s total revenue.

Facebook puts into practice what marketing specialists have long summed up in the slogan: “If you’re not paying, you’re the product.”

The “product”, in this case, is all the personal data that users hand over to Facebook every time they react to a post by clicking “like”, add an emoji, post something themselves, or launch a search on the site.

Data, that treasure trove 

This mass of information is invaluable for online advertisers because they can use it to “target” people with messages that are more likely to get their attention because many of their tastes are already known.

This is a big selling point for Facebook, which gives advertisers detailed instructions on how to identify and target their preferred group.

“Find people based on traits such as age, gender, relationship status, education, workplace, job titles and more,” is one approach suggested by the company. “Find people based on what they’re into, such as hobbies, favourite entertainment and more”, is another.

“Two billion people use Facebook every month. With our powerful audience selection tools, you can target the people who are right for your business,” Facebook says.

It is all legal 

Facebook’s business model is perfectly legal: The network does not itself market any of the data, but instead sells access to the data to third parties, which often do not read or respect the terms and conditions of use.

This can lead to allegations of data breaches. The Cambridge Analytica firm is accused of misusing data of 50 million Facebook users for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, in violation of Facebook’s policies.

Facebook also only uses what users freely divulge about themselves.

“Facebook does not look for anything beyond what you yourself have put on the web, and that’s the user’s responsibility,” said Gaspard Koenig, head of GenerationLibre, a French think tank.

“But it’s all done in a way that people can’t change those terms of use,” he said.

Facebook does allow users to restrict advertisers’ access to their personal data in the Settings page of their account. This will not remove all ads, just the ones specifically targeted at them.

SAN FRANCISCO — Many Facebook users rely on the social network to figure out what is going on in the world. But what if the world Facebook shows them is wildly distorted?

That’s the question raised after a former employee of a data mining firm that worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign alleged the company used Facebook to bombard specific individuals with misinformation in hopes of swaying their political views.

The accusations raised alarm across the Atlantic on Monday, sparking an investigation into the firm, Cambridge Analytica, by the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office. In the US, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat-Oregon, sent a letter asking Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg whether the social media giant was aware of other data violations on its platform, and why it failed to take action sooner.

The controversy drove Facebook’s stock price down nearly 7 per cent on Monday, suggesting that investors are feeling skittish about the regulatory liabilities of a company that has spent the last year dogged by questions of fake news and Russian propaganda.

The scope of Facebook’s problems ballooned after Christopher Wylie, a political strategist who used to work for Cambridge Analytica, alleged on NBC’s “Today” show on Monday that the firm believed that if it could “capture every channel of information around a person and then inject content around them, you can change their perception of what’s actually happening”.

By mining Facebook user data, Wylie said the company could tailor the ads and articles individual users would see — a practice he calls “informational dominance”.

In a video secretly recorded by Britain’s Channel 4, Mark Turnbull, managing director of Cambridge Analytica’s political division, suggests users targeted by the firm would not know their online experience was being manipulated.

“We just put information into the bloodstream of the Internet… and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again … like a remote control,” he said. “It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘that’s propaganda,’ because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda,’ the next question is, ‘who’s put that out?’”

Turnbull, according to Channel 4, also bragged about the firm’s practice of recording politicians in compromising situations with bribes and sex workers.

In a statement sent to The Los Angeles Times, Cambridge Analytica accused Channel 4 of entrapment and rejected the allegations made in the report. In a separate statement, also issued on Monday, the firm said it did not carry out “personality targeted advertising” for President Donald Trump’s campaign.

The company obtained the Facebook data from millions of accounts through a Cambridge University psychology professor who had permission to gather information on users of the social media platform, but violated Facebook guidelines by passing it on to a third party for commercial purposes. Although Cambridge Analytica said in a news release over the weekend that it deleted this data as soon as it learned it broke Facebook’s rules, Wylie alleged that the firm continued to use the information.

What’s worrisome about Cambridge’s alleged practice, say social media and psychology experts, is that it works on even the most rational of people.

“Attribution theory teaches us that if you hear the same thing from multiple sources, then you start believing that it might be true even if you originally questioned it,” said Karen North, a social media professor at the University of Southern California who has also studied psychology.

In Cambridge Analytica’s case, Wylie on Monday accused the firm of going beyond simply serving targeted ads to people on Facebook. He alleged that the firm “works on creating a web of disinformation” so that unwitting consumers are confronted with the same lies and false stories both on and off Facebook.

“Even if you thought it was just one biased person or one paid ad, when you start to see it everywhere, you start thinking there’s a critical mass of people or experts that buy into the same position,” North said. “You start to believe there must be a groundswell of support for it.”

The ability to target ads at individuals isn’t unique to Facebook. But what makes the social media giant’s role profound is the breadth and depth of information it collects and the sheer number of people who use the service. Last year 67 per cent of Americans told Pew Research that they get at least some of their news on social media. In 2016, 64 per cent of those who got their news from social media got it from only one source — most commonly Facebook.

Since the 2012 presidential campaign, Facebook has been the “No. 1 destination” for digital media strategists looking to influence politics, according to Laura Olin, a digital strategist who ran social media strategy for former president Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.

Prior to that election, campaigns spread their focus among Facebook, Twitter and traditional media outlets, she said. But in 2012, three things became clear:

— People were spending more of their online time on Facebook than anywhere else.

— It reached a broader demographic than its competitors.

— Ads could be targeted more effectively on Facebook than on other platforms.

The Obama campaign that year was able to aim advertisements and messages at voters based on gender, location and existing political beliefs.

“We showed people what it could look like,” said Olin, who ran Obama’s Facebook pages during the campaign. 

If you are the type of traveller who worries about catching the flu or another dreaded disease from a fellow airline passenger, a new study should put your mind at ease.

If a plane takes off with one infected flier, it is likely to land on the other side of the country with only 1.7 infected fliers, researchers found.

What you really need to watch out for is a flight attendant with a cough or runny nose. A single one of them can infect 4.6 passengers during a transcontinental flight.

A group that dubbed itself the FlyHealthy Research Team came to these conclusions after flying back and forth from Atlanta to the West Coast on 10 flights and paying extremely close attention to the movements in the economy-class portion of the cabin.

Ten researchers boarded each flight and spaced themselves in pairs five to seven rows apart, sitting in seats on opposite sides of the aisle. From these prime vantage points, they took copious notes on who went where. Then they recorded each step in an iPad app.

Over the course of the 10 flights — which lasted between three hours and 31 minutes and five hours and 13 minutes — several patterns emerged:

— Passengers seated along the aisle were much more likely to move about the cabin than passengers seated next to a window. Overall, 57 per cent of those in window seats stayed put for their entire flight, compared with 48 per cent of those in middle seats and 20 per cent of those in aisle seats.

— There were two main reasons for people to get up during the flight — to go to the lavatory or to access the overhead bin.

— Among all 1,296 passengers on all 10 flights, 84 per cent had “close contact” with another passenger seated more than 1 metre away. The typical number of such contacts was 44, and they tended to last for 24 seconds. For most travellers, these encounters added up to between 18 and 98 minutes, with a median time of 47 minutes.

— Crew members typically spent 67 minutes — about one-third of their flight time — “in contact with passengers”, the researchers wrote. However, their total amount of contact with passengers added up to 1,149 “person-minutes” on a typical flight, compared with only 206 minutes of contact with fellow crew members.

The researchers used all this data to simulate what would happen if a passenger in seat 14C (an aisle seat) were sick. To be conservative, they used a transmission rate that was four times higher than a real-life example from 1977, when 54 passengers and crew were forced to sit on the tarmac for 4.5 hours, and 38 of them became sick with an influenza-like illness as a result.

Even under these circumstances, the odds that a single passenger would start an outbreak were extremely low.

For the 11 closest passengers — those seated in rows 13, 14 or 15, in seats A through D — the odds of being infected were “high”, the researchers wrote. But for everyone else on the plane, the odds of being sickened by the person seated in 14C were less than 0.03.

For the plane as whole, the simulations showed that on average, only 0.7 additional passengers would become sick over the course of the cross-country flight.

The researchers repeated their work with simulations that placed sick passengers in other seats. In the worst-case scenario, only two people became infected as a result of their in-flight exposure to another passenger.

A sick flight attendant was another story, however.

Since these crew members move all around the cabin and get close to so many passengers, they have much more opportunity to spread disease-causing germs. The researchers calculated that one sick crew member would infect 4.6 passengers, on average, even though these simulations used a lower transmission rate.

“A crew member is not likely to come to work while being extremely sick,” the researchers explained. “If she or he came to work, she or he would be more likely to take medication to reduce or eliminate coughing.”

That may seem like wishful thinking, but tests of airplane germiness revealed the cabins were so clean that they were unlikely to have been serviced by sick workers.

Over the 10 flights, the researchers took 229 samples of cabin air and swabs of surfaces such as tray tables, seat belt buckles and lavatory door handles. None of those samples contained genetic evidence for any of 18 common respiratory viruses — a striking finding considering that eight of the flights occurred during flu season.

The researchers cautioned that their results could only be applied only to transcontinental flights on planes with a single aisle and three seats on either side. (All of the planes in this study were Boeing 757s or 737s.)

Passengers would likely behave differently on shorter-hop flights or on longer-haul flights from one continent to another. That would affect the disease transmission dynamics in the cabin, as would other cabin configurations with more aisles (and thus fewer seats that are far from an aisle).

The FlyHealthy team also noted that their simulations included only transmission by droplet — cases of germs spreading via cough or sneeze, for instance. They did not try to model the transmission of “virus-laden particles”, which can travel further and linger longer.

Even the most powerful supercomputers have trouble performing the calculations necessary to take these into account, they explained.

Their study was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.